Till the birds sing

I just woke up from a terrible nightmare. The reality wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t very peaceful either. I sat up in the bed and started to fiddle with my mobile just to take my mind off. When I was very young-a child, my father once told me when you wake up from a very bad dream that too an early morning one (which according to popular belief are supposed to come true) you go to some running water or pond , touch the water and say “let the water wash away my nightmare”. Little-me was so scared that it will come true that I used to do this whenever I had a bad dream. This habit has stuck through all these years. It is a silly thing but it has never failed to make me feel better and strangely protected.

I cannot sleep anymore. I am sitting beside the window watching the purple sky slowly lighten up as the first rays of sun pierce the dark night. Slowly the sky is turning into a pinkish orange. And I can hear the first bird singing its song. I haven’t seen a sunrise for so long. Other birds are also joining in. it is such a beautiful thing – early morning and birds singing. It makes you feel there are some things that haven’t changed. Every morning the little bird still gets up. It hasn’t lost hope in this world. Maybe everything is not lost. There is still some love left in this heartless world. There are still lush green fields, beautiful mornings, wise old trees, vast blue oceans and places not poisoned by modernization, hearts which haven’t been turned black yet by selfishness, ego and pride. Simplicity can still be seen. There is still poetry and romance and beautiful fairy tales. There is still some hope left… till the birds sing.

Dreams

I wrote this one night while laying on my bed. Sleep evaded me for hours. I felt so bad lying and trying to force myself to sleep. I felt I had done injustice to the dreams once dreamt, injustice to my past. Each night is the same hating myself for letting go.

My face pressed upon the pillow
The darkness blinding my eyes

I am waiting for sleep to take me

In the world of blissful oblivion

Shackles and chains bind my mind

They torture me, soothe me

With dreams once dreamt

But each day the pain reduces

I move towards inevitable death

I am scared, I am panicked

Dreams and reality, fact and fiction

They refuse to separate

As fatigue clouds my mind

Sleep takes me to a dreamless world instead.

The B-day

It was my birthday yesterday. There were so many things on my mind. It was my last birthday in college. I don’t know when my next birthday comes where i will be and where my friends will be. The day started in a perfect way. I felt so special. As the day progressed I felt perfectly happy.

 

I have been troubled and sad for 2 years. I could never concentrate on anything else. I was afraid, scared, haunted by nightmares but for a few months I feel at peace. Last birthday I made a promise to myself. This birthday i could see it coming true.

 

But the night turned out to be unexpected. I cant believe people can behave in such a wrong way. Somewhere deep down I still believe the bed time stories told by my grandmother where wrong doers are punished moreover they are ashamed and feel sorry for their doings. That is important to me that people realise their mistake. But yesterday I couldn’t believe as they lied on my face. I felt terribly angry. Sometimes I forget who I am and I think if I can scold people and shout at them they will realise their mistake. I am stupid to think that. I know. But i cant control myself when I see people talking like that. I felt so bad that so many people were disturbed because of me. But it was either tolerating that or speaking up. Every time I tolerate that kind of thing I end up feeling bad and under confident. I wanted to speak up. I wanted them to be punished. I had nightmares again.

 

But I felt bad for the situation. I felt scared for my friends. And yes at night I fell weak, emotionally weak. I just wanted to lean on someone. I did it again. Those few months of peace I lost in a single day. I just have to change my attitude. I have to be more practical and strong. I wish I could go just a few weeks back.

A dark night. Millions of stars thrown carelessly all over the sky. That’s what prompted me to write this post. Music thudded in my ears through the earphones. Still I could feel the bus alive with noise and warmth. I gazed out into the sky and couldn’t tear my eyes off. Very few times I have seen a night sky so beautiful but never before have felt that way. I stuck my head out of the window and felt the cool night air rushing past my ears, ruffling my hair. I kept on gazing like someone possessed. I watched as the open fields and tall trees gave way to some few homes lit by the yellow sodium light, people walking in narrow lanes with torches in their hands. The sky also changed. It was as if the stars shy of the lights below hid behind some veil only to come out when the lights disappeared into darkness. How tiny we all are compared to those stars, how insignificant! The light I was seeing was not even there now. We went from stone age to medieval age through industrial revolution to modern era… all a tiny dot of time compared to those stars. I was lost in awe. The sky fell pale as the ground dressed itself and the ground fell dark as the sky put on its glittery gown. I kept on watching the cycle. The misty glow of the sky, the warmth of the villages all kept coming back and leaving. It was so beautiful. Nothing mattered what was past, what was to come… I lived in the present, I was who I was and not who I wanted to be. I was in sync with life.

stages of love…

When I was a teenager I thought I knew exactly what love was. I was so sure I will find my true love someday. My idea of love was slowly formed from the hundreds of books read and movies that I had watched. Love to me was simple, natural. Friendship was something that was always with you. Friends never left you, they never judged you.

 

Love is when you love to be with someone. When you can be yourself with him and still he loves you back. Love is when you feel love is there. You feel warm, cared, loved and he makes you smile, you make him laugh and you stick together through all odds. You try to make the other feel special in your own stupid ways.

 

Love is fighting and then resolving everything to say i love you once again. Love is getting jealous. Love is not talking getting angry and then again just smiling it all away.

 

Love is crying and pain? Love is getting hurt? Love is being misunderstood? Love is getting clingy?

Love is still loving him madly.

 

Love is being hurt? Love is being left? Love is screaming in pain after desertion?

 

Love is sweet. Love is forgiving. Getting back together again and the longingness felt.

 

Love is doubting? Not trusting? Playing the detective? Driving him to the wall. Getting hurt.

 

Love is desertion. Love is pain. Desperation? Again getting back? Love is you running around like mad just for his care, to make him smile. Love is his coldness?? love is not even being with each other? Is love a duty?

 

Love is not smiling together for you start to forget how long. Love is living worlds apart. Love is a cold shoulder. Love, to him you don’t even matter. Love, he knows but still wont come. Or worse, he hasn’t spared a thought. Love is still hoping and making a fool out of yourself? Love is still pain. Love is now tears washing away the last of love left.

 

It was meant to be so simple. So easy. Just smiles and laughs. Love to me was losing the easiest game of life. They write about stars and moons and vows. Tales of mermaids and princes and true love? All bullshit. All they should tell you is how not to love, how not to care, how to forget and hurt. Then my love you will win the game of love.

run!

Each and every breath we take we are slowly moving towards death. Death is something inevitable so complete… the end of our existence. After that nothing will matter. Love, hatred nothing will exist. People want to live on through their progeny or want to stay alive in the hearts of people who will remember them for some great thing that they did. I don’t want that. It simply does not matter to me. Actually nothing matters to me any more. Everything I see around me is a lie. Nothing really matters here. There is evil inside us. The root of evil is human mind. There is evil inside me too. Sometimes I can feel it. Everything that we see, touch we destroy it.

Everyday each one of us sees some picture of a black little boy posted in facebook begging or dying of hunger. We pity them. We feel bad for them. Why? At least he is better of than the rest of us wasting our time on facebook, chatting… at least he is getting some reality. At least he is trying to be alive. We are already dead. When was the last time you felt really good about being yourself? ‘Yourself’ … does it exist anymore? Who are you? We are all the same. A herd of stupid cattle led by a stupider dog. Our whole attention is focussed on how to be cool and desirable in front of others. Would you ever fall in love with yourself? Everyone I look and see. Everyone is the same. Girls dressing up and being stupid just to get guys attention. And guys all with same hairstyles, wearing cool tees drinking, partying and thinking themselves to be the bosses of their lives.

When was the last time you looked outside saw a tree and felt amazed at how big and old it was? Or perhaps saw a beautiful sight and you were so mesmerized that you didn’t think of taking a photo and putting it on display to show the world. I hate it. I hate sharing anything with this world. Everything I have shared have been twisted into something it is not. Look outside your laptop screen. Look outside that expensive phone you carry. We are killing everything around us. Moreover we are killing ourselves. We measure our worth with amount of money we earn, measure beauty by how fashionable we look. Sometimes just see beyond it. We are told to feel sorry for beggars so we do. We go to orphanages and try to spend time with kids we feel sorry for. Don’t feel sorry. Maybe its way better than your life. At least they are not hooked to inanimate objects which tell them how to feel, how to dress, whom to love or how to behave. Think. Sometimes just stop and think.

You will get this chance at life only once. And every moment you are trudging towards your end. Don’t be that fake and stupid person anymore. Wake up. And live. You know that television is also known as the “idiot box”? Then think what we can name social media and those enormous applications we spend our time indulging in? With social media and chats we have created a world of illusion and we live inside it. Compete inside it. We don’t even get a chance at real life! Snap out of it! And live the moments you have. Do what you want to do! Go out dress like a pauper and laugh at all those who laugh at you. See around you…not people but see this earth. Fall in love with it. Don’t be herded by an insolent dog. Run away! See things never seen before. Do things never done before. Create something before you die.

 

impractical

I wrote this many days back…

Life is so strange sometimes. People say do what you feel like. Fairy tales and all the lessons from our childhood teach us to do what is right. But sometimes life cannot be simplified down to rules and “right” and “wrong”. A point of time comes that the right thing to do causes more pain and hurt than the wrong thing and you can never be sure whether it is the right thing or not. I guess that is the time when we realise we have grown up.

Life is so similar to a game of chess. One move among thousands of moves changes it into something completely new, never before explored. And you are left all alone to take your decisions and make new strategies. Only if winning and losing could be defined so easily in life. What are the set of rules? Who defines them? You play with your own rules. Who is the opponent? What do we play for?

Sometimes one thing gives warmth to your heart. It feels so beautiful so natural to let yourself drown in that warmth. You bathe in its sunshine, it is the only thing missing in your life, the miracle and you feel complete, happy. Then even before you realize you are fighting, with the world, with yourself just to make it stay. Is that wrong? To want something to last forever? Then the next moment you are licking your wounds, thinking how stupid you were not to realize how impractical everything was. You realize it was “wrong”. So which one is right? Before the impractical you or now these “practical” rules? If everyone defines their own set of rules who judges which one is practical? Assuming we are happy or sad or right or wrong by our own feelings, how do you differentiate the “impracticality” from the “practical” when the impractical feelings were also felt so much, maybe even more than the practical ones?  Which is real then? This doesn’t make any sense does it? Does life?

Days pass by culminating into months. The mind seeks the impractical, the stupid thing. Taking morsels of the present it builds its own web combining the present, past and the future. Lost in the thick sticky web I can’t differentiate the present any more. The whirlwind of the impractical and real, the right and the wrong blinds me. The mind slowly approaches like a giant spider playing with its prey. I give in.

life @ mumbai 1

Mumbai. The decision was so sudden I did not get time to think twice. Suddenly one morning we are running all over for rail tickets and then booking flight tickets. Then the sudden air journey to Mumbai. There were so many things I thought I would write about… how the clouds looked like giant waterfalls at first and then they resembled misty undiscovered islands. I never got tired of looking outside and staring at the shapes that the clouds were forming. It was so beautiful. I was in the literal sense mesmerized! I thought of so many words to describe them so many beautiful things to write about but now they are slipping past my memory. After two hours the flight zoomed in on Mumbai. I could see green hills approaching. And then I could see a train looking like a centipede in the valleys. Everything looks so beautiful from the above. The pilots must feel so powerful traversing the world so fast and looking at cities from the above where everything appears so small so powerless. It is unearthly. I could feel that inside me. Even before landing on Mumbai I had seen the whole of Mumbai. The tall buildings slowly materialized in front of my eyes. Then came the slum areas with buildings packed like matchboxes. Everything appeared like a child’s playroom.
Then we arrived. Familiar faces. They create mixed feelings sometimes. You are so happy to see them. You realize this is what was incomplete in your life. For that spur of the moment you forget all the habits of the person you don’t like and you are just rejoiced to see him and then those habits start. Then your life is back to normal. You don’t rejoice but you don’t feel incomplete either.
At first we went to Juhu beach. On the journey to Juhu beach we faced ‘Mumbai traffic jam’! at first we were thinking its almost same as Kolkata but then we had to admit we had seen nothing like this before. The first sight welcoming us to Juhu beach was thousands of heads… the crowd. So many people were there…that it took sometime to figure out that it was a beach. Another sight I remember clearly which was new and special to this beach. There were hundreds of human shaped balloons floating in the sky. At first I thought that they were gas balloons but slowly realized that they were normal balloons made to rise up like kites. Every other kid was holding a balloon. After we had walked down the beach did we see the sea. Arabian sea!
The froth of the waves touched us. So many people were so happy shouting and waving at each other. Couples were holding hands and walking sharing so many loving looks and nudges and smiles. Juhu beach made me feel lonely yet loved. I suddenly could feel the love of my parents and my sister enveloping me from all sides. I could feel so much love from them but I can never respond. There must be some glitch in my system. The moment when I feel love and want to respond that is the moment I just cant and I don’t know what to say or do. I start being surly and moody and irritated and I love to be surrounded by them but stay quiet. We came back to a guest house in dadar. One of the most beautiful places I have seen. The room had glass windows on the seaside and we could see the whole city decorated in lights. My favorite sight in any city. At night when you look outside and see the whole city dressed so beautifully. It looks so glamorous. So fashionable classy and breathtaking. A bridge ran through the sea. Cars were racing past that bridge. Just like pictures and dreams. I slept living that dream and I woke up in that dream. I felt so happy. Just a view made me so calm and melancholy. Then my second day in Mumbai started. Today was depressing. There are many thing to write about but I am too sleepy and a third day awaits. So I have to get early. And so here I am signing out..

despair…

The scorching heat of the sun was burning everything. every life was stagnant. It was mundane. Just like my every other day when I cant differentiate one day from another. All are the same. The last drop of happiness had evaporated long ago…such that it left no mark of its presence. It felt as if the cool touch of happiness was just a dream. All that was left was the scorching dry day. The heat of the sun exhausted my body… I could cope up with the world anymore. And just like every other day I felt lost.

Memories of the past flashed across my mind sometimes. But they were very vague as if those were never part of my life. As if I had seen them in television or maybe dreamt about them. For I never could try and feel what all I had felt before. The dryness of the world had seeped inside me. I was loosing my ’each day’ in a big sea of ’everyday’… caught in the rat race of doing the right and toiling towards ideal I had lost myself. Above me was the flaming hot sun enjoying my despair and all round me was the race towards nothingness in which I was running… running away from myself.

My nightmare had become reality . All my dreams lost. I was thrown in the dark, infinite well of nothingness. As my days passed I was slowly suffocating to death. The dark walls pressing all around me. My desperate screams couldn’t pierce the silence, couldn’t crack the walls. Slowly I lost my voice, became dumb. Inside those dark walls my dead body existed lost in time as I was running in the desert with no end.

Then it suddenly came. From the other end of the world… where I am from. From that world came the clouds. The dark blue clouds covered the sky. I was so dumb and senseless that I didn’t even recognize them. It grasped the world. I writhed to set myself free. It encircled me like doom and pressed me from all sides. It spread through my nerves like a deadly poison paralyzing me. I writhed in agony I tried to scream but in vain as I had lost my voice to every mundane day to the rat race. It seemed as if it would last forever… torment me till the never ending end. It tore me apart and then it rained! I felt after such a long time! I felt pain! The rain washed my senses. I can once again feel the emotions that I had once felt. Darkness encompassed the world. I fell down on the sand and closed my eyes.

Once more I can see myself… the bleak remains of the past. I can hear the raindrops falling on the dust turning it into clay. My heart rejoiced as it felt the pain for the cool winds at the end of the storm whispered in my ears that I was alive! Now they are leaving me again…the rain, the clouds, the wind returning to the world where I came from. As I lay under the stars basking in joy and pain at the same time the thought of tomorrow deadens my heart.

You don’t understand. Do you? don’t worry no one can. I will try to be like you from tomorrow again. Trapped in the clutches of your world I can never escape into my world again. Confined by the conventions, scared of doing wrong again from tomorrow I shall run lost in the desert sand. Hurdles will make me fail. Enraged by my bondage I will scream, cry in despair. You will laugh at my stupidity, my ‘weakness’. I will hate you with all my heart.
Then one day running like this I will become one of you and forget my world. I will die while still breathing. Everyday will be just so mundane…I will lose myself in nothingness…

Once Upon a Time…

As the sun caresses the trees with its golden orange love the trees gracefully dance to show there happiness. Trees names of which I don’t know. And I prefer to keep them unknown. Do you believe in fairy tales? This moment I feel closest to a fairy tale world…who said they don’t exist? Giant big trees with unknown names… look at their leaves dancing in the breeze heralding spring… feel this slight warm weather… as I look out of my window I see the fairy tale world unfolding. Sometimes we are to blindfolded to look. Giant trees touching the sky. Maybe they are whispering to themselves tales of unknown worlds, brave princes and beautiful princesses, an evil king with cloak darker than the darkest night and elves singing in marvelous gardens. Maybe these trees try to tell so many tales. Maybe we have become deaf. Look at the leaves falling down like rain. These make me feel so much I cant say but I cant retain. The branches of that big tree just outside of my window. I know which of them are evil and which love me. I see their silhouettes in the moonlight and their toil during the day. Up in the sky…just where the branches touch the sky sometimes a big bird comes and sits talking with the tree. It carries news from kingdoms far far away. Where love still exists. Where men haven’t lost themselves to themselves. Where lovers still love and drown in each others eyes. Where there is a happily ever after. don’t you know? Such a world exists. The trees have told me. The squirrels and the birds know too. Look beyond yourself you will see. Those mountain tops, patches of snow…a small lad taking his cattle up the mountain to feed them. A small lass daily waits for him behind the curtains to cross her house. He knows. That is why he slows down every time he passes by desperate to get a glimpse of his love. Its is a world where miracles and magic happen! Haven’t you seen branches shaped like mountain deer? Some shaped like snake? They come alive when you are not looking. Wizards and witches fly past the purple sky just beyond the clouds. As a child you used to look at the clouds and see their shape you knew it then. When you look at the moon do you ever wonder that so many lives are looking at the same moon? The wolves are howling in the jungles…horses are running wild in rocky deserts. They see the moon too. Two birds cuddling in their nest singing sweet love songs. The hooded spies of evil kings running through the dark forests. The fair princess held captive by the evil witch also looks through the window at the moon waiting for her lover to carry her away in his arms. There are evil witches who try to pollute love by hatred. But you have to wait for love to show the way. I just got a glimpse of that world. The falling leaves told me… do you know why the leaves are falling? They are making a beautiful golden path for a brave handsome prince to ride past. His horse is darker than the night. He rides past in search of his princess. Have you tries to just stop and listen? Try.. The trees will tell you too then you will believe me. See past the curtains of society. See past the concrete walls of thousands of years. Look in someone’s eyes you will see that world. It exists here. But we have lost our sight… see as you saw as a child. You will see them. I see them, believe in them. You will believe too…